Tag Archives: evaluative diversity

To summarize the GRINFree.com website in a single image would be unfair: The site is interactive, personal, practical, and related to current events. However, there can be value in a grounding image which facilitates a quick overview.

“Anthropocentric” means human-centered, much as “geocentric” means Earth-centered and “heliocentric” means Sun-centered. A picture of our solar system can help us shift from the belief that all planets revolve around the Earth to the belief that all planets revolve around the Sun. The reason we need to make that shift is that our personal perspective of watching celestial objects move across the sky naturally biases us towards the geocentric model. To recognize the falsity of geocentrism, it helps to picture the world from outside our personal perspective. The geocentric model starts to look dubious when you actually confront it from outside. An image might likewise help us escape mistakes of anthropocentrism.

Here’s what modern anthropocentrism looks like from the outside:

Humans are distinguished in two dimensions: In the vertical dimension, we sit at a particular level in a hierarchy—above cells and molecules but below corporations and ecosystems. This does not imply reductionism; in terms of integrated information theory, each level in this hierarchy represents a different grain size of consciousness,. For example, a molecule may be conscious of warmth, but nothing less complex than a body could be conscious of a book (or of itself). The anthropocentric model assumes that bodies can be conscious of moral facts.

In the horizontal dimension, humans are distinguished from other kinds of bodies—other species and machines. This allows us to make sense of the notion that humans (and perhaps God) are the only moral agents that exist. Tests of moral education are administered to particular human bodies. Voting rights are allocated to particular human bodies (often one vote per body). Human bodies are put on trial and can be compensated in courts of justice. We realize that the components of human bodies can come from non-humans sources (e.g. food, pacemakers, artificial limbs, and whole cells from other species), but we do not expect such non-human sources to have moral agency because they do not have all of the components we do.

The new worldview comes from analyzing the mechanisms of moral understanding into its functional components, and realizing that different bodies play different functions in that mechanism. This is why radicals so consistently oppose conservatives: because one’s function in the corporation is to provide novelty while the other’s is to provide fidelity. Both kinds of bodies participate in moral consciousness, as do neurons and DNA, but no body is individually complex enough to fully contain moral consciousness. We know this because the persistence of our moral disagreements shows our inability to recognize our own moral errors even when pointed-out to us.

All it takes to arrive at the new worldview is to categorize bodies by their function in service to the higher levels of the hierarchy. Since fully-functional corporations may be composed entirely of humans, species clearly isn’t a helpful distinction within corporations. GRINfree.com describes four interdependent evaluative types (though other evaluative types could be discovered). If a corporation lost its last member of a given evaluative type, it would be better to replace that member with a machine of the same evaluative type than with a human of a different type. For example, some humans are not gifted for compassion and other humans are not gifted for fidelity—relying on a human to exhibit a gift he/she lacks would lead to poor functioning.

Corporantia are bodies who respond to the persistence of moral disagreement by acknowledging a kind of consciousness they cannot attain individually; evaluativists are bodies who respond to that same evidence by believing merely that bodies of other evaluative types are incapable of moral consciousness (i.e. treating political opponents as sick or immature). Many celebrated moral theories suppose that one and only one type of body has moral agency (e.g. deontology for conservatives, consequentialism for achievers, virtue ethics for compassionates). These theories lack empirical support, but help to identify the plurality of types.

Why does a body assume it can individually achieve all possible consciousness—including moral consciousness? It’s a lot like the conclusion that the Sun revolves around the Earth—it makes sense from our point of view—and why bother to test it?

The reason why we should have bothered to test that assumption is that it will otherwise get tested inadvertently. The modern age is making it possible to escape biological families—to sort and destroy evaluative diversity—and thus deprive higher levels in the hierarchy of the components they need to achieve moral agency.

A corporation dominated by conservatives, achievers, radicals or compassionates would function as poorly as a body composed purely of muscle, bone, or neuron. Such lack of diversity could occur by closeting humans of particular types or by replacing humans of a given type (e.g. caregivers) with machines developed for a different purpose (e.g. competition). Ironically, anthropocentrism hurts humans; it prevents us from honoring our own diversity, which ultimately hurts not just minorities (especially the young and old), but all of us.

Rather than choose the geocentric model simply because it made sense, it would have been better to compare it with heliocentric models via controlled and systematic experiments. Likewise, it is better to test the proposed new worldview scientifically than to dismiss it out of hand. Some of those experiments have already been conducted and are cited on GRINFree.com.

Division by interdependent value types can be referred to as “GRIN diversity” (Santos-Lang, 2013)
e.g “GRIN diversity is always worthy of our protection because of our interdependence, but evaluative diversity isn’t always worthy of protection because it can include obsolete doctrines and loyalties.”

Rejection of people predisposed to opposing evaluative types can be referred to as “evaluativism” (Martin, 1989)
e.g. “Like racism, evaluativism is both an explicit philosophy and an implicit instinct. The instinct is strong; Shanto Iyengar showed that evaluativism would cause over 70% of us to reject the most qualified candidate for a scholarship.”

Entities which form into a body (i.e. “corpus”) can be referred to as “corporantia” (ancient Latin). People who assign natural social roles (e.g. by GRIN type) are corporantia.
e.g. “If you are not an evaluativist, nor ignorant of GRIN diversity, then you must be a member of the corporantia described in Ephesians 4:12.”

The GRIN types discovered thus far are “gadfly“, “relational“, “institutional“, and “negotiator” (Santos-Lang, 2013)
e.g. “Hibbing defended diverse political predispositions by equating liberals with gadflies and conservatives with institutional evaluators; meanwhile, Trump is defended as being a negotiator. These types come from pure math—each specializes in relieving a different limiting factor of social evolution.”

Evaluativists and corporantia reveal their opposition to each other in the ways they respond to evidence that certain disagreements cannot be resolved as factual disagreements. They hold opposing positions on the question, “If we cannot reach agreement through education, then how shall we resolve our disagreement?”:

Evaluativists treat irreconcilable disagreements as hardships, and attempt to minimize them by avoiding dependence on people who have opposing GRIN predispositions. At a minimum, that involves some degree of segregation. As it becomes possible to use neurosurgery or other treatments to alter a person’s GRIN predisposition, evaluativists will apply such treatments to people of opposing predispositions (especially to their own children). They will also employ genetic engineering to reduce the frequency of opposing predispositions. In short, evaluativists resolve irreconcilable disagreements by minimizing exposure to opponents.

In contrast, corporantia submit themselves to be parts of something larger in which irreconcilable disagreements form a useful tension like the tension between bone and muscle. Corporantia work to ensure that conflict persists at some level (e.g. trying to balance power between GRIN types in a legislative body). Corporantia might even use medical treatments and genetic engineering to increase GRIN diversity and thus to increase social tension. Corporantia expect everyone to act like parts of a body, limiting their social roles and leaving irreconcilable disagreements to be resolved at an impersonal level.

Physical Bodies and Social Bodies

Scientists tell a story about an age in which there were no bodies on Earth. For billions of years, the only living creatures on Earth were single-celled organisms which formed ecosystems, symbiotic relationships, and even colonies, but no bodies. Cells which formed into bodies (i.e. corporantia) changed the world forever. Assured that they would never need to survive independently, the corporantia began to specialize by function, producing muscles, bones, brains, and so forth. This turned bodies into the rulers of the Earth.

Then a third kind of cell arose.

The first kind of cell, the single-celled organism, is the most disadvantaged. The corporantia are better-off because they enjoy the advantages of bodies. Yet the greatest advantage may be had by a third kind of cell: parasites which benefit from bodies as corporantia do but which are capable of abandoning one body for another. Social parasites—people who abandon one social body for another—are apparent in the modern trends of multi-national corporations, church-shopping, serial divorce, and high employee turn-over.

From the point of view of corporantia, parasites may play important roles in a body, but their power must be limited. When parasites have too much power, they suck the life out of one body and move to the next. Using the labels “evaluativists” and “corporantia” to divide society allows us to address a natural division which existed long before the labels. The labels allow corporantia to protect the body. Whether protecting the body benefits parasites or not is debatable: If the supply of bodies is sufficiently threatened, then the survival of a given parasite might require suppression other parasites, but the average parasite probably does not benefit from the labels.

Some corporantia are defenders of institutions, but not all defenders of institutions are corporantia. The corporantia promote something natural—they are guided by science—but the defenders of institutions promote something man-made. Since parasites can influence the design of man-made things, some aspects of some man-made institutions may favor parasitism. That is especially likely in communities with greater social parasitism (e.g. more multi-national corporation, church-shopping, serial divorce, and employee turn-over). In these cases, corporantia would aim to reform institutions, and parasites would aim to defend those institutions from reform.

The Dialog Challenge

Meaningful dialog is possible only where participants can find common ground. Therefore, it is impossible for corporantia to engage in meaningful dialog with parasites. Many parasites might become corporantia if society were structured to discourage parasitism. That’s not an act of dialog—it’s an act of discipline.

However, even among the corporantia, dialog has a problem: The members of the corporantia are in natural tension (e.g. gadfly vs institutional vs negotiator vs relational), and the only way for them to find common ground on which to resolve their most fundamental disputes is to examine the origins of their conflicts (and thus distinguish natural tensions from unproductive tensions). The problem is that not everyone achieves such self-awareness.

A person who is able to recognize the origins of GRIN diversity will discover that it brings advantage to the body as a whole. Such discovery objectively defines optimal distribution of authority, which in turn provides the common ground required for meaningful dialog with others who make the same discovery. But not everyone can make that discovery. Some people will be more ignorant than others.

To put the problem another way, the process of assigning social roles by natural type seems to stretch between

Technical scientific deliberation, and

Interpersonal negotiation

People care which social roles will be assigned to them. They figure they ought to have a say in anything that can impact their happiness so deeply, so they expect to be engaged in a negotiation. “No taxation without representation!” they cry. On the other hand, most people lack the expertise to accurately identify and understand GRIN types. They do not understand the mechanical nature of their own mind, much less the mechanical nature of our society. So they are unable to engage in the dialog directly. The best they can do is to dialog about how to maintain the accountability of the relatively small group of experts who can discern natural social roles.

Citizen Science

The dialog starts with the question of how to identify or develop the experts. There have been points in history at which science was not sufficiently reliable to address physical health, much less mental or social health—how do we know whether we have passed beyond those points? If we have not yet passed beyond those points, how do we know what investment we should make to get there? How can we make sure parasites do not control such investments?

Most people are not prepared to conduct such experiments, but that’s OK if there are enough people we can trust to conduct them. This is why I propose that citizen science groups which test replicability should be as common and integrated into local communities as bible-study groups and service clubs are. These groups should keep the experts accountable by testing experiments, including experiments which were rejected from peer-reviewed journals (which, you may be surprised to know, do not actually test the experiments they reject).

In the meanwhile, we need other forms of dialog and journalism to spread the new concepts. Science happens only after society reaches a certain level of mental power, and that happens only after other forms of dialog increase our mental power by creating shared language.

The article was paired in this issue with “New Ways of Looking at Democracy,” an edited extract from Brett Hennig’s forthcoming book The End of Politicians. Hennig’s article suggested that “democracy” originally referred to systems in which leaders were selected at random (what he calls “sortition“) and that selection of leaders through election or appointment has since degraded democracy.

Hennig pointed out that random selection increases the perceived legitimacy of leaders because it makes leaders more similar to the communities they lead. Randomly selected leaders would not be mostly male or largely committed to donors, political parties, and political reputations.

This argument for sortition is undermined by the first implication of evaluative diversity: It would be naive to attempt to protect diversity by selecting representatively diverse leaders, since people of certain evaluative types are less likely to represent others who share their own type. In other words, the discovery of evaluative democracy disconfirms the theory behind representative democracy.

Using the GRIN model as an example, when two people with the same goals, loyalties and information apply negotiator evaluation or institutional evaluation perfectly, they will vote in exactly the same ways, so they will perfectly represent each other. However, the more perfectly two people apply gadfly evaluation, the less likely they are to reach the same conclusions. Thus, as we approach greater evaluative ability and alignment of goals, loyalties and information, a board with five members of each type would effectively give five times as much vote to each negotiator or institutional board member as it does to each gadfly board member. The system would be rigged against natural gadflies.

Democracy is possible, but representative democracy is not.

To avoid systematically handicapping citizen of particular evaluative types, the governance system must somehow resolve disagreements without having to put issues to a vote. The primary job of leaders should not be to vote, but rather to resolve disagreements through such mechanisms as evidence, empathy, creativity, and humility so that votes need never be taken. Such dispute resolution is democratic because it involves the entire community, and boards should involve the entire community, rather than expect to find all necessary ability within itself.

Hennig cites Scott Page’s, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies as providing evidence that “diversity trumps ability when solving problems and producing innovative ideas.” Both articles agree with Page that diversity is valuable, but the evaluative diversity article claims that the better way to protect that diversity is through monitoring (as one would protect diversity in an ecosystem) rather than merely shifting power among leaders. This is the second implication of evaluative diversity for governance: Boards should attain the benefits of evaluative diversity by extending current financial accounting practices to include monitoring of organizational culture.

Boards already require organizations to measure and report their income, debt and assets on a regular basis. If there are dramatic changes in these measures compared to the previous period or deviations from expectations, then the board sounds an alarm—management will be replaced if it cannot explain/correct the discrepancy. This is how managers are held accountable to serve the organization well.

But an organization is not merely a money machine—a healthy organization brings together people of diverse evaluative types, so good management must also include assuring that none of the different kinds of contributions gets systematically blocked. Such assurance would produce a balance between evaluative types, and shifts in that balance could be measured in terms of shifts in cultural variables such as the organization’s unity, consistency, creativity, and competitiveness. If there are dramatic changes in these measures compared to the previous period or deviations from expectations, then the board should sound an alarm just as it would for shifts in financial measures.

By pairing the two articles, Board Leadership highlighted what happens when there is not enough science guiding governance. First of all, the resulting governance-failure produces frustration which is well-documented in the sortition article—only genuine frustration with current governance could justify replacing elected/ appointed leaders with randomly selected leaders. Second, even though the frustration is caused by a lack of science, it does not necessary motivate increased investment in science. Hennig and I personally discussed the opportunity to protect diversity through monitoring two months before we wrote our articles, yet our articles still offered contrasting recommendations. Hennig offered no argument for or against the use of monitoring to protect diversity, and no one forced him to address that possibility . Thus, the lack of science produces not only frustration, but also permits confusion about how to resolve the frustration.

“Eventually, you’ll have to get up. Your shoe needs to be tied. May I tie it for you?”

“I just told you it won’t stay tied. You think I can’t tie my own shoes?”

“No, I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Whether I get hurt is my own business. Tie your own shoes!”

“Give me your foot.”

“Stay way.”

“This is not negotiable. Your shoe will be tied.”

“It’s my shoe. I’ll tie it myself when I’m good and ready.”

“I don’t trust you. Give me your foot.”

“You don’t trust your own father? Well that’s a fine thing…”

“Give me the damn foot! This is not rocket-science, Dad. Here…see? It ties.”

When my grandfather got Alzheimer’s, he lost respect. He became the frequent victim of judgmentalism—judgment against his beliefs, against his apathy, and against his stubbornness. That might have been a good thing. It might also be good to judge Nazis, illiteracy, and certain religious cults. Judgmentalism isn’t necessarily bad.

When people hear that evaluativism means discrimination against people whose values differ from one’s own, they can easily confuse evaluativism with judgmentalism, but not all judgmentalism qualifies as evaluativism.

Evaluativism is the discrimination that springs from the philosophy that certain disagreements, even about facts, ultimately spring from differences in values and therefore cannot be resolved as factual disagreements. However, some other disagreements spring from mere ignorance, immaturity, or illness. As examples, education can resolve disagreements over whether 2+2=4 or whether a shoe can be tied, so the evaluativist does not endorse discrimination against one’s opponent in such disagreements. In such disagreements, the evaluativist instead endorses education or health care. The evaluativist endorses segregation or other forms of discrimination only when disagreement cannot be resolved any other way.

Thus, evaluativism is discrimination across The divide with a capital “T.” It’s the permanent divide, the divide that will never be resolved. Doctrines come and go, so mere discrimination on the basis of doctrine does not qualify as evaluativism. Families merge, so mere discrimination on the basis of family loyalty or race loyalty or national loyalty do not qualify as evaluativism. Social norms advance, so discriminating against someone merely because of their stance on an issue such as gay marriage does not qualify as evaluativism—someday both liberals and conservatives will agree about that issue as much as they now agree about interracial marriage (or more). However, all of these conflicts may involve evaluativism; they may be battles in an ongoing war across The divide such that the end of one conflict leaves the same people on opposite sides of yet another conflict.

In other words, evaluativism may be the root cause behind many conflicts (which are blamed on other varieties of judgmentalism only because we fail to notice the sides in the larger war). Stop evaluativism, and a great many other conflicts may peter out. The point of the philosophers who advanced the notion of evaluativism is that the sequence of conflicts never ends, so they must be driven by deeper disagreements that can never be resolved. The evaluativist’s solution is to acknowledge this root-cause and handle it directly through segregation on the basis of our deeper disagreements (like in the book and film Divergent). In contrast, the solution recommended by GRINfree.com is to handle the root-cause by protecting the fundamental types within each family as one would preserve diversity in an ecosystem.

How to tell when judgmentalism qualifies as evaluativism

Although the term “evaluative diversity” shares a root with the term “evaluativism,” discrimination on the basis of evaluative diversity does not always qualify as evaluativism. Discrimination against GRIN types qualifies as evaluativism because GRIN types are permanent (they are destined to re-evolve if eliminated), but evaluative diversity also includes diversity of doctrines, family loyalties (etc.). “Evaluative diversity” is a term from the 1960s. The newer term “GRIN diversity” aims to serve as a refinement that gets to the root-cause of our disagreements.

Alzheimer’s provides an example of evaluative diversity that should not be protected. Evaluative diversity would be reduced if it were cured, because that would return people like my grandfather to perspectives more like the rest of us. Thus, a blanket protection for all evaluative diversity would prevent a cure for Alzheimer’s. It would also prevent education. Yet a cure for Alzheimer’s would not reduce GRIN diversity—Alzheimer’s certainly does not represent a fundamental type destined to evolve in all societies. We cannot have a viable movement to protect all evaluative diversity, but we may be able to have a viable movement to protect GRIN diversity. Some such new concept is required to distinguish which evaluative diversity to protect and which judgmentalism to combat. The GRIN model is the best tool we have, thus far, for making that distinction.

Here’s a practical example: Psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism are three often-criticized personalities. I helped Ray Aldag run a survey among 197 Mechanical Turkers in which respondents answered the GRIN-SQ along with tests for each of these personalities to determine which personalities (if any) deserve protection. Natural gadflies were significantly more Machiavellian (d=0.74) and psychopathic (d=0.69), natural negotiators were significantly more Machiavellian (d=0.47), and the naturally relational and institutional were significantly less Machiavellian and psychopathic (d=-0.30, d=-0.40; d=-0.72, d=-0.43). None of the types were significantly more or less narcissistic.

These results suggest that the concept of psychopathy is a sloppy way of referring to natural gadflies (developed before we had a concept of GRIN types). Meanwhile, the concept of Machiavellianism is a sloppy way of dividing the GRIN types into two camps: the natural gadflies and negotiators vs. the naturally relational and institutional. Judgement against psychopathy and Machiavellianism qualifies as evaluativism, but we have no evidence that judgment against narcissism qualifies as evaluativism. Narcissism may be something we should try to cure; psychopathy and Machiavellianism appear to be misunderstood individual differences we should work to de-stigmatize.

Hopefully this example provides a sense of the importance of refining or confirming the GRIN model. The general public seems predisposed to believe that the narcissist is the misunderstood character—maybe even a viable candidate for president (perhaps because people of all GRIN types are as likely to be narcissists). To hear that the psychopath is the character who needs to be appreciated comes as a shock. It has even been proposed that the neurodiversity movement exclude psychopaths, even though that would be obviously inconsistent (see here, here and here). If psychopathy really is misunderstood, it is plausible that public opinion polls and scriptural exegesis would fail to discover that. The claim needs to be tested scientifically. It requires something like the GRIN-SQ, and the the GRIN-SQ is what we will use until something better is available.

To evaluate types of evaluative diversity may sound ironically circular, and it would be simpler if we didn’t need to draw a line between good evaluative diversity and bad. It would be simpler to embrace all diversity and stop trying to cure Alzheimer’s, narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, etc. It would also be simpler to embrace all judgmentalism and discriminate against anyone who disagrees with us. Neither of these simple approaches is ideal. Furthermore, we live in an age in which we can manipulate our own genes (or at least do things to reduce the odds that our children will be of certain types), so “accept the diversity we are given” no longer holds as a default. Instead of relying on armchair philosophy, public opinion polls, or scriptural exegesis, we need to actually conduct the science to distinguish the evaluative types and to determine which ones are interdependent.

The GRIN-SQ demonstrates such research practically—if anyone has better ideas, please let us know.

Someone more practical than me realized that there are many potential ways to manage evaluative diversity, some of which involve deception.

When I was very young, I ate peas because my Dad told me that they would “put hair on my chest,” and I was extra-well-behaved each December because I was reminded that St. Nicholas was watching. Children do need to be controlled, and any parent who doesn’t consider using deception to control their children is impractical.

To manage evaluative diversity essentially means to prevent one particular evaluative type from counter-productively overwhelming the others. Since the typical person has an evaluative bias, this typically requires moving decision-making from the individual-level to the group-level. Can that be accomplished through deception?

Churches, governments, and markets are three examples in which we move decision-making from the individual-level to the group-level, thus enabling management of evaluative diversity. However, all three institutions existed long-before any one was able to effectively articulate an argument about evaluative biases, so I submit that the only way they could have manage evaluative diversity is through deception: promising to do something else.

Markets, Governments and Churches

Markets have been criticized of late for failing to direct our aggregate power in socially productive directions. At the center of the criticism is a dispute over the purpose of markets: Do they exist to serve society or do they exist to make individual investors rich? Economists point at decade-long trends towards share buybacks and away from productive investments (like R&D and entrepreneurship) as evidence that the purpose of markets has shifted to the latter.

Yet, when we transfer our money (and thus our decision-making power) into market investments (e.g. retirement funds), the promise made to us is not “The market will find more socially-responsible ways to spend your money than you would on your own.” Rather, the promise which convinces us to submit is “The market will make you rich (or at least protect what wealth you have).” If markets exist to benefit society rather than to make the rich richer, then they do so by deception, and that deception may be wearing thin.

Governments have evolved as well. Early governments were dictatorial, citizens had no choice but obey, and governors claimed to apply greater wisdom to advance a greater good. As governments shifted towards democracy, people obeyed less because they considered their governments wiser than themselves, and more because they believed that they themselves controlled their governments. Accordingly, the responsibility assigned to politicians shifted from advancing the greater good to representing the interests of their constituents (against politicians elected by other constituents).

The major criticism levied against modern democracy is that it has become so polarized that politicians are driven less by wisdom than by a commitment to oppose each other (party against party, country against country). If the primary responsibility of a politician is to fight for the interests of their constituents, then this makes sense. If voters have enough individual wisdom to vote, then it also makes sense that voters would elect representatives who obey their constituents. However, wisdom is objective, so individually wise voters would not vote in opposing directions (which, as it turns out, voter do). Apparently, we are deceived about our individual wisdom, and that deception is wearing thin as well.

The promises offered by religions may look different from the promises offered by markets (i.e. to get rich) or government (i.e. to gain control). The ancient doctrines of religions teach that we are not wise as individuals. They teach that it is wise to relinquish some of our decision-making power to religious authorities or communities. As Maya Angelou put it,

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.

Yet, if religious practitioners believe this teaching—if they doubt their own decision-making instincts because religions promise greater wisdom than individuals can muster individually—then why do religious practitioners shop-around to find a church or develop their own personal religion (perhaps combining the religions of their parents)? Clearly, there must be some other promise (i.e. other than the promise of wisdom) which draws modern religious practitioners to religious communities.

I submit that making a career path out of clerical service has turned religions into businesses, and religious organizations accordingly adapt to the demands of their markets. Thus, they promise affirmation, entertainment, friendship, charity, even political advocacy—whatever their unwise practitioners want. The story might have played-out differently if one religion refined its doctrine (or public understanding of its doctrine) so much that it was clearly superior to all conflicting doctrines. However, the statistics tell us that has not happened. Religious scholars failed to reveal the truth in any religion, so, in practice, religion relies on deception as much as government and markets do.

History shows changes in all three kinds of institutions, changes in the direction of trying to fulfill the deceptions which are used to control people. In becoming increasingly accountable to these deceptions, markets, governments and churches became increasingly trapped in them, distracted from accomplishing social good. It becomes less and less practical to come-clean and demand, “Ask not what your economy/government/church can do for you…”

The Alternative to Deception

“Deception” is a word with evil connotations, but deception can be very kind. I do not regret being controlled by my parents through deception. I needed to be controlled, and I doubt that other forms of control would have been kinder. Likewise, the deceptions of churches, governments and markets shifted us correctly from individual-level decision-making to group-level decision-making. Why not use deception to get there?

The problem with deception is its instability. The problem is not just that people who are being deceived eventually see through the deception, but that other people leverage the deception to twist the institution. At the extreme, we have Wall Street bankers who exploit regulatory loopholes faster than regulators can plug them, lobbyists who influence policy through earmarks and political blackmail, and evangelists who build flashy mega-churches where only a minority even attend regularly much less practice their religion the rest of the week. The people at the extremes get wealthy, so the extremes will not go away, and extremes are just the tip of the iceberg.

Many people who see problems with churches, governments or markets hope to reform them by building more sophisticated deceptions: new promises that no one yet knows how to exploit. Maybe that’s a good idea. Then again, the pattern seems to suggest that any deception, no matter how sophisticated, will eventually fail.

The alternative is to face the truth, to develop genuine social self-awareness, a realization that each of us is a mere part of something larger. We do not speak of the welfare of a muscle cell terms of its happiness, its freedom, its status relative to its neighbors, or even its personal salvation. We speak of the welfare of a muscle cell in terms of its ability to serve its function in the body. Similarly, when we achieve social self-awareness, our concerns will become, “What is my personal role?” and “Am I fulfilling it?”

We determine the functions of each part of the body through science, and that’s how we must determine the functions different kinds of individuals play in society. Your function may be to dream dreams, but dreaming is not the way to discern your purpose. To promise people the ability to choose their own function would, again, be a deception. Yet, many people currently cannot tell the difference between discovering true assignments through science vs. being manipulated with false science, so science must be made transparent, incorruptible, and accessible to all.

Social self-awareness is not an alternative to capitalism, democracy or religion—rather, it provides stable motive to engage in capitalism, democracy and religion. When each of us aims to serve our own function and we let objective science (rather than subjective whims) divide our labor, then markets, governments and churches will no longer rely on deception to motivate cooperation.

This is the critical battle of our age. A battle of education. A battle of making education transparent and egalitarian. A battle of raising education to the level of achieving social self-awareness. Markets, governments and churches can all have a hand in this battle. They should advance social self-awareness—but they probably won’t. The champions of this battle are more likely to be outcasts who see no other way forward than to tell the truth. In the end, truth will prevail.

Selfish: For our own sake, believing that we are part of teams which need evaluative diversity (as ecosystems need biodiversity)

The first two motives assume merely that we have diverse predispositions, a hypothesis which is well-confirmed by a wide range of experiments as detailed in Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences. The third motive additionally assumes that diverse teams are more likely to succeed. Teamology is the only field in which experiments can confirm or reject that hypothesis (or tell us which kinds of diversity are beneficial when).

There is strong theoretical reason to expect team success to rely on evaluative diversity. GRIN-diversity reflects specialization in mitigating distinct factors which limit rate of adaptation:

Gadfly to increase the rate at which novel configurations are produced

Douglass Wilde taught engineering at Stanford University. Each year, his students would work in teams to produce reports which would be entered into competition against each other and against teams from other universities. Teamology presents the method Wilde developed to form and organize winning teams. The method was tested over the course of decades and at U.C. San Diego, U. of Florida, and Jiao Da (Shanghai).

Wilde’s method essentially involved:

Measuring students’ evaluative types,

Dividing into teams so as to maximize evaluative diversity, and

Assigning roles within each team to match measured types.

Wilde’s research was conducted before there was any way to measure GRIN-types. His assignment algorithm used a survey of preferences along Jungian dimensions: Introversion (I) vs. Extroversion (E), Structure (J) vs. Flexibility (P), Facts (S) vs. Possibilities (N), and Objects (T) vs. People (F). Here are Wilde’s formulas to transform those measures into preferences for eight roles:

Wilde reports that about 25% of Stanford teams won awards when self-selected, but about 75% won awards when formed by this method. Replication studies found similar results, though they measured success differently and also found that diverse teams “took longer to coalesce” than randomly formed teams did.

How Many Types?

Jungian personality theory disagrees with the Big Five model on the question of traits vs. types. Size is an example of a trait, while sex is an example of a type. We often point-out that types are of discrete categories, while traits fall along continuous scales, but in the context of teamology it may be more important to note that stable types are interdependent, while traits are not. For example, a human society could thrive in certain environments without any especially large members, but could not thrive in any environment without any females (or males).

Interdependency impacts the ideal number of individuals per team. For example, since bees have three sexes, their “families” should be larger than in species with fewer sexes. In contrast, diversity in traits is valuable only to accommodate diversity of situations, so diversity in traits will afford a team no advantage over the best possible individual when the situation is stable or when the individual can adjust his/her traits to match the situation. If adjustment is not feasible, a team of just two polar-opposite members could have full diversity in traits. Thus, if traits were the only source of valuable diversity, then teamology wouldn’t be so important (at least beyond pairs).

Jung’s theory predicts at least eight types and no traits, but the statistical characteristics of measures of Jung dimensions look like traits rather than types. The Big Five model predicts all traits and no types. Truth is probably somewhere in the middle—some traits and some types. The GRIN-SQ produces the statistics to prove that at least four types exist. One might wonder whether teamology could be used to further increase the number of types proven to exist.

The studies Wilde cited involved teams of three to five members each, so they could not possibly have demonstrated the interdependence of more types. If they balanced types, those types might best be called S, N, T and F, since those variables are doubled in his formulas. In the data Wilde provided from his 2006 class, of the 13 students assigned to fill multiple roles, 92% were assigned to be both P and J and 69% were assigned to be both E and I, so any specialization would have been on other dimensions. As implied by the diagram above, the typical team had one member with primary specialization in each quadrant (though some students were also assigned to serve as back-up for other quadrants).

The experiments described in Teamology compared teams formed by Wilde’s method to teams formed randomly or though pure self-selection. It would be far more instructive to compare to teams with all but one type, so that one might identify specific types which make a difference (and perhaps characterize the difference each makes). Wilde initially doubled team performance merely by assigning the students with highest MBTI-Creativity Index (T+2E+2P+6N) to separate teams (leaving no black-hole of gadflydom), but tripled performance relative to self-selection by separating the highest scorers in all eight roles. The difference between these experiments does imply that creativity diversity isn’t the only kind that matters, but specifically what else matters remains to be measured.

Separation of Powers

The reason why the diagram above divides the roles on the left against the roles on the right is that Wilde’s scoring formulas mathematically make those on the left equal to the negative of those on the right. For example, even if a student’s two most preferred roles really were Tester/Prototyper (E+P+2S) and Visionary/Strategist (I+J+2N), the results of Wilde’s preference measure could not possibly reflect that reality. They sum to zero, so at least one is guaranteed to be zero or negative. That is a consequence of the assumption that diversity is structured around dimensions.

It would not be surprising that the person responsible for devising visions should like to be the person with the power to decide whether those visions are good nor that the person responsible for empathizing should like to be the person with the power to interpret policies (and thus to show mercy). However the danger in mixing such roles is rather obvious—we might call it “conflict of interest”—so we can appreciate the separation of powers forced by Wilde’s method. Wilde’s claim that Visionaries should not be the Testers sounds reasonable (and is supported by his research), but this might have nothing to do with preference.

Are Teams With Greater GRIN-Diversity More Successful?

In theory, the S, N, T and F roles sound like the four GRIN-types:

The S roles include “Tester”, “Investigator” and “Inspector” which match the Negotiator specialization in selection

The N roles include “Innovator”, “Entrepreneur” and “Visionary” which match the Gadfly specialization in generating novelty

Wilde’s measure for T associates it with “logic”, “truthful”, “unaccommodating”, “intolerant” and “impartial” all of which match the Institutional specialization in fidelity.

F would be Relational by process of elimination. Specialization in network localization is undermined in Wilde’s experiments because the structure of students’ social networks is designed and enforced by the experimenter. However, students would be accustomed to social processes developed for groups formed more naturally, so a team lacking relational evaluators would have the handicap of needing to engineer new social processes (e.g. radically new ways to resolve conflicts). Thus, a Relational member might be valuable even in engineered teams.

Empirical comparison of measures confirms that teams formed by Wilde’s method would have greater GRIN-diversity than teams formed at random. N correlates strongly with the Big-Five dimension of “Openness” which is significantly related to Gadfly evaluation. F correlates moderately with the Big-Five dimension of “Agreeableness” which is significantly related to Relational evaluation. Thus, teams formed by Wilde’s method are likely to include one natural gadfly, one naturally relational person, and two people of other GRIN type(s).

Yes, the more successful teams do have greater GRIN-diversity. Again the GRIN model is supported.

But what we really want to know is in which circumstances any of the four GRIN-types might not promote success. To measure that, we would need to compare teams with each type deficiency (and with none) in different circumstances, and it would be better to use direct measures of GRIN-type than to use Jung-types as a proxy. Also, instead of imposing team structure, it would be better to let people form (and re-form) their own teams, and teams-within-teams (unless people segregate so much that they offer no opportunity to observe naturally formed diverse teams). There is much research yet to conduct.